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The global bottleneck has moved from starting businesses to sustaining them, and Bahrain scores top-tier on the one condition most economies rate weakest.
Bahrain entered the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor for the first time last year and placed seventh in the world. Drawing on responses from 2,712 adults and the assessments of 46 national experts, benchmarked against 56 economies, the 2025 Bahrain National Report ranked the kingdom seventh on the National Entrepreneurship Context Index and awarded top-tier scores across nine framework conditions, including access to finance, entrepreneurial education, government policy and programmes, and commercial and legal infrastructure. It found 55.7 percent of adults planning to launch a venture within three years and 18.3 percent already engaged in starting one.
Debut rankings are usually modest. This one places Bahrain ahead of most economies it is routinely compared with, and it lands at a moment when the global definition of a strong ecosystem is quietly shifting.
What the World Is Now Short Of
GEM’s 2025/2026 Global Report describes a widening survival gap. Early-stage entrepreneurial activity has reached record highs worldwide, while progression into established business status, meaning a firm still trading beyond 42 months, is stalling across many economies. Enthusiasm is abundant almost everywhere. Continuity is the scarce commodity.
The report is specific about where that shortage originates. Entrepreneurship education at school is the lowest-rated framework condition in 33 of the 53 economies surveyed, and fear of failure deters two in five adults from acting on an opportunity they can already see. The counterweight it identifies is experience: people who have previously exited a business are markedly more likely to start another.
Both findings run in Bahrain’s favour. It sits in the minority of economies rated top-tier on entrepreneurial education, and it has a working population of operators who have already been through a full cycle. That combination is the part of an ecosystem that cannot be legislated into existence, and it is precisely the part that turns a high formation rate into firms that last.
The Trained Operator
Hanan Janahi is a usable illustration of the type. Her public record runs back at least to 2018, when the online retailer WafiApps named her chief happiness officer, citing two decades of industry experience behind her, an English literature degree from the University of Bahrain and a Family Bank honour for her work on women’s empowerment. She has since co-founded the car servicing platform AutoBay, served as chief marketing officer at the Bahraini HR and payroll platform Huduri, and worked with Get Real Price MENA, the regional arm of a Finland-headquartered price monitoring business. Of an earlier venture she says: “Beginning, I had an e-commerce app. We sold it successfully.”
Her own account of that record is notably unromantic, and it maps onto what GEM measures. In a Forwardpreneurs cover feature in the magazine’s Bahrain series, she argued that entrepreneurship is not something a person is born with but something they train. In an economy rated top-tier on entrepreneurial education, that reads less as a personal slogan than as national policy working as designed.
The training she describes is commercial rather than technical. “If you can’t sell your product to yourself, you can’t sell it to me,” she has said. Every venture on her list sits in a category where the product is not the hard part and distribution is, which is the skill that survives a change of sector.
Where Bahrain Is Already Ahead
The Bahrain Women’s Entrepreneurship Report, published alongside the national findings, records female entrepreneurs starting ventures at rates that outpace their male counterparts, concentrated in technology and data-driven industries, reaching local and international markets, and leading on adoption of new tools including artificial intelligence. It also found 93.8 percent of established women entrepreneurs placing social and environmental impact ahead of profit, well above global averages.
Janahi’s advice to that cohort is characteristically direct. “Just be a woman. Don’t change,” she said in a filmed interview. “You don’t need to change to survive.”
Repeat Founding Is Not Repeat Winning
The honest qualification belongs to the model rather than the market. A portfolio is a hedge, and hedges limit upside as reliably as they limit losses. Four ventures across e-commerce, automotive services, HR software and price intelligence spread risk, but the companies that recycle capital back into any ecosystem tend to be built by founders who stay with one business long enough to compound it. MAGNiTT recorded two technology IPOs across the whole of MENA in 2025 and a median exit horizon of six years, close to the longest commitment a diversified operator is likely to give a single venture. Her own sale, meanwhile, is described by her rather than documented in public filings.
That is a question about how experienced founders choose to deploy themselves, not about whether Bahrain has them. On GEM’s evidence it plainly does, alongside the education pipeline to produce more. The kingdom spent a decade building the conditions and has now had them independently ranked seventh in the world. The measure worth watching next is the number of people who have been round the cycle once, and unlike a framework condition, that number compounds by itself.
